Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the banning of an anime in New Zealand - and discusses failed fan attempts to have the ruling overturned. I point to potentially fatal flaws in a classificatory system that insists on reading a text against the "interpretive community" for which it was intended.

Paper long abstract:

Comic books have been an intense site of surveillance and anxiety since the 1954 publication of Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today's Youth. Wertham's text set off fierce debates in the United States, and in Australia raised concern over the deleterious impact that American culture was thought to be having on Australia's youth. In recent years a new panic has emerged in the media, this time focused on pop culture materials originating in Japan. However the terms of this debate are somewhat different, focusing not so much on the negative effects that Japanese manga and anime are supposedly having on young readers but on the illegality of the depictions of young people that appear in these media. An increasing number of manga and anime titles are being banned as "child abuse publications," and fans given fines and in some instances prison sentences for possessing this material. This paper looks at the banning of one such title in New Zealand as a "child abuse publication" - a title which happens to be freely available in Australia with just an MA 15+ rating - and discusses failed fan attempts to have the New Zealand ruling overturned. In doing so I point to potentially fatal flaws in a classificatory system that insists on reading a text against the "interpretive community" for which it was intended.

Paper short abstract:

Do Japanese emoji make possible global language or instead make national differences more apparent? Using examples of narrative communication from text messages to literature, I explore how emoji have led to both playful ways of expressing sensitive topics and dangerous cultural misunderstandings.

Paper long abstract:

Especially after a standard set of Unicode emoji was made available on iPhones in 2011, these instantly recognizable yellow faces, holiday symbols, and other icons have globalized and have been put to originally unintended uses. Cellphones, blogging platforms, and social media have mainstreamed emoji, which require Japanese cultural knowledge to be understood. Various media have been playfully created out of and "translated" into emoji. Realizing emoji's commercial potential, at least thirteen American celebrities have sold their own emoji, starting with Kim Kardashian's racy Kimoji (2015). When Japan's Prime Minster Abe Shinzō visited the United States in 2015, President Obama thanked him for emoji, demonstrating the political role of popular culture and how transnational fandoms construct national images. The Oxford English Dictionary chose the "crying with joy" emoji as the top English "word" of 2015. Emoji have been used to encourage people around the world to "do things," from read books to vote. Arguably, many people do not realize emoji are from Japan. What kind of cultural literary does emoji exemplify? Do they make possible global language that transcends nations or instead make national differences more apparent? How do emoji influence how Japan is viewed abroad?

I argue that emoji provide insight into one form of Japanese culture that easily globalizes and is incorporated into local contexts: that which is grounded in Japan but understandable across nations. On one hand, emoji exemplify conventions of Japanese cellphone and Internet use, including access patterns, visual languages, gender conceptions, and corporate tie-ins. Japanese authors have helped determine how many emoticons are enough in text messages, literary narratives, and other communicative forms. On the other hand, emoji exemplify how Japanese popular culture is changing global communication. While internationally misappropriated emoji have led to playful ways to express sensitive topics, they have incited potentially dangerous misunderstandings of Japan. I explore case studies from different types of narrative communication, from texts messages to literature, to investigate how emoji have advanced multiculturalism but perpetuated cultural stereotypes. Do emoji ultimately reaffirm the enduring importance of the written word in the age of visual narratives?

Paper short abstract:

The Unako 'eel girl' commercial depicts moe characterization more broadly within the Japanese mediascape, beyond the world of otaku media mix fandom. Contextualizing moe aesthetics within a broader analytic perspective, I argue against Azuma's claim that Japan lacks a grand narrative.

Paper long abstract:

The use of characters, whether human, animated, or anthropomorphized, is entrenched in the Japanese media mix and widely used in marketing. A subset of these characters employ the typically feminized moe character aesthetic said to evoke positive affect in its fans who are stereotyped as otaku. This paper investigates problems that have emerged in the use of moe characters developed for promotions intended to attract a wider segment of the population. Specifically, the use of the character Unako 'eel girl' in the marketing of eel products of Shibushi in September 2016, resulted in such outcry within Japan (and, when it hit the global English media, abroad) that the video commercial was pulled from YouTube after one week. Though my interview with the producer reveals that the actions depicted in the video represented the raising of eel rather faithfully, this display of insider knowledge evoked widespread misunderstanding in the larger audience. Yet the makers themselves saw no such problem, and supportive voices were raised in their defense. Unako is not an isolated case: the global media asks, why does Japan persist in moe character representations?

Azuma has argued that Japan has lost its grand narrative, leading otaku to cobble together smaller stories from a database of moe-invoking character features. Against this claim, I consider moe in the context of Japan's political, social, and economic system in which, despite its Equal Opportunity Law, entrenched patriarchal heteronormativity provides a pre-existing framework for relationships of female dependency and male support. This entrenched cultural linguistic schema, often incorporating nature metaphors, has been echoing through the mediascape prior to the rise of moe characterization, for example in music lyrics and televised dramas. Women in the 'small stories' emerging from this schema are young, dependent on male approval, and in popular media can be idolized, as in AKB-type singing groups, fictionalized as in the moe database, or even turned into eels, remaining viable subjects of male affections of as long as they remain youthful and cute. Unako provides a link between fictionalized moe characterization and live performance that exemplifies this grand narrative.

Paper short abstract:

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Paper long abstract:

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